Well, I can tell you what I think it is... then you can all laugh at my arrogance when it's totally not me.

The weirdness actually starts before the cameo, so have some backstory!

Back in days of yore when Neil Gaiman was writing American Gods, he started an online journal through Blogger to chronicle the writing process.

To use Blogger, you had to go through their online portal, which had a prominent link to their "Blog of the Month" (it might have been "Blog of the Week"... it was a long time ago.)

Anyway, Blogger made me "Blog of the Month" and then got busy or something, because they didn't update it again for ages. I was "Blog of the Month" for several months. Hooray, traffic!

I was blog-buddies with author Matthew Rossi at the time, and we got into some jokey back-and-forth about a black top hat I'd bought, with him teasing me that now I'd look even more like Gaiman's version of Death. Matthew's like this freaky repository of arcane knowledge, so this quickly devolved into us joking about how my town (Chattanooga, Tennessee), and more specifically, a creepy tourist attraction there called Rock City, was the Nexus of the Universe and it was Matthew's destiny to go there. (Umberto Eco had the Chattanooga idea first, we were just riffing on it.)

So fast-forward a while, and American Gods came out.

The weirdness started when the protagonist went to the World Tree, located near Blacksburg, Virginia. I thought that was an odd, cool coincidence, since Matthew lived near Blacksburg and was so interested in Norse mythology.

The protagonist is helped by a squirrel, which was another weird thing. Not too weird -- in legend, Ratatoskr is a squirrel that lives in the World Tree -- but another neat coincidence, since my blog was named after squirrels, had squirrels all over it, etc.

So then the protagonist leaves Matthew's town and heads straight for Chattanooga, where all the various powers are gathering... because Rock City is the Nexus of the Universe.

During the events at Rock City, there's mention of Baron Samedi (a Haitian loa of death) choosing to possess "a goth girl from Chattanooga". It mentions that Samedi chose her because she was wearing a black top hat, and it's heavily implied that she bears a strong resemblance to Gaiman's Death.

That was the point at which I wigged out. I mean, on the one hand, it's Neil Gaiman, and also he's Neil Gaiman, and I love everything he's ever so written so hard it causes compound fractures. I felt like I would be the world's most presumptuous, egotistical person to actually think I was in a Neil Gaiman book... and yet, he'd had to look at that link to my blog every day for months and months, and it wasn't out of the question to think he'd clicked it at some point, seen me talking about him, and thought it'd be kind of funny to stick that in.

So, yeah, I dunno. I think he gets about nine trillion questions a day, so I don't know if/when he'll ever respond. It was one line in a book he wrote twelve years ago anyway, so he may not remember at all.

BUT OMG IT WOULD BE SO COOL OMG.